Hold Me Down
by hashtagartistlife
Summary: This wasn't a systematic slaughter, a carnage designed to serve any sort of purpose. He could have wiped them all out in the first week. No, this was a game. And she was meant to be the other player. [Nalu]


**... I have no excuse for this. idk just take it**

* * *

 **Hold Me Down**

 **by _hashtagartistlife_**

Levy McGarden was the first to go.

It had made no sense, back then, why his first target had been tiny Levy, standing ten feet away, unlikely to pose a large threat to him.

Now Lucy knew.

At first, she had thought he was just slaughtering anyone he had known in his previous life, had thought it a quirk of fate that Levy had been the first to be felled. She was wrong. It was about her. It had been about her from the start.

Lucy had treasured her friendship with Levy above most things in this world, but in that moment when she saw her head go flying past, splattering her with blood, she wished she had never met Levy at all.

Her fault. Because Levy had been her friend. Her. Fault.

Lucy's fault.

Natsu had turned to her then, eyes glowing red, black tattoos twining itself around his arm, and smiled.

* * *

Happy had lasted merely seconds after Levy. Before the blood from her decapitation had had time to dry on Lucy's face, Natsu had whirled around and leapt back to her side, grabbing Happy by the head and smashing his skull open on the ground. That had broken the horrified spell that everyone had been under; Erza had leapt to her feet with a heartbroken war cry and Gray had thrown himself at the dragon slayer. They were both repelled back, and in the next instant Lucy heard the wet sounds of flesh separating from flesh as Alzack and Bisca met their untimely ends.

Lucy screamed and screamed as three other guild members were torn apart trying to defend Asuka. She kept screaming for a long time after she was led off the battlefield.

* * *

The next time she encountered Natsu, Jet and Droy had their hearts punched out of their chests. Loke was ripped messily in half as he defended Aries; Taurus expired of a crushed windpipe. Virgo, at least, was given a clean death; her spine was wrenched out from behind her. Lucy heard the snap as her spinal cord detached itself from the body, and managed to feel relieved that at least she had not suffered.

Laxus had both his arms and legs shattered, and every second tendon in his body slashed. But he survived this battle, at the very least; Lucy did not feel it was compassion that had made Natsu spare Laxus' life. Not when he then proceeded to dismember the three Raijinshuu in front of Laxus' helpless form. There weren't big enough pieces of them to bury by the time he was done.

Natsu was merciful to the Strausses; he killed all three of them in quick succession. In any case, Lucy did not think Mirajane and Elfman could have survived losing Lisanna a second time. Her murder in front of them had caused both of them to snap; the next things to snap in them had been their necks.

He had turned to Lucy when he was done burning Scorpio to a crisp, and told her in a spine-chilling voice to _get Markarov Dreyar._

By the time Lucy had lunged at him with one of Erza's broken swords, he had disappeared in a wisp of smoke.

* * *

With the deaths of Markarov Dreyar, Jura Neekis, Jellal Fernandez, Kagura Mikazuchi, Lyon Vastia, Minerva Orlando, Gildarts Clive, Macao Conbolt, and Ichiya of Blue Pegasus, the resistance looked towards Gray, Lucy and Erza for leadership. Not that Lucy felt like much of a leader; her hands shook all the time and she couldn't look anyone in the eye. This is all my fault played in her head like a broken record. Natsu wasn't killing them. This wasn't a systematic slaughter, a carnage designed to serve any sort of purpose. He could have wiped them all out in the first week.

No, this was a _game._

It had taken Lucy three weeks to figure out that _she_ was supposed to be the other player, and by then the number of mages in Fiore had been _quartered_.

* * *

Gajeel Redfox had lasted a surprisingly long amount of time for someone who had been bordering on suicidal since Levy's death; he was killed a month into Natsu's conversion, stabbed in over 200 different places as he babbled Levy's name and attempted to continue to fight. Sting and Rogue, as well as Frosch and Lector, accompanied him to his grave. In terror, Lucy had sent their only remaining Dragon Slayer - Wendy Marvell - into hiding in another country. It hadn't mattered. The very next battlefield, Lucy was confronted with a helpless Wendy, held up by the neck as Natsu's bloodred stare bore into her. He slashed her open from shoulder to hip, and his clothes dyed themselves crimson. Carla, he simply crushed with one hand.

Lucy did not remember how that particular battle had ended. The last thing she recalled before blanket darkness was an inhuman sound torn from her throat as she threw herself at Natsu's bare chest, aiming for the heart. She had woken up surrounded by the corpses of over 200 friends, lying sprawled atop Wendy's mangled body, with the words 'I love you' echoing around in her head, whispered in a throaty, husky dragon voice laced with smoke and madness.

* * *

The rules of the game were everchanging and unpredictable. Gray and Erza had been allowed to live so far; in the vain hope that perhaps the closer they were to her, the higher the chances of survival, Lucy had cultivated a closer friendship with Chelia, Juvia, Cana and Romeo. As if he had read her mind, the four of them perished in Natsu's fires together. Lucy made a point of distancing herself from everyone after that; he broke into their headquarters one night and silently made his way through the hospital. Laxus and Porlyusica, as well as dozens and dozens of others, were found with their throats slit in the morning.

The slaughter was slowing, though by necessity and not by choice. There were precious few people left around Lucy; precious few left in the resistance at all. In fact, there were precious few people left, period. Zeref had wanted an apocalypse; Lucy wondered if he knew he got his wish, stone cold dead as he was on some battlefield where they had first faced demon Natsu.

"Why me?!" she had screamed into the wind after their last battle, as a weeping Erza wrapped an unmoving Milliana in her cloak, "Why us?! WHY ME?!"

She was sobbing as she tried to put together the pieces of Yukino's body when the answer came, murmured on a coal-scented breeze.

"It's _always_ been you and me."

* * *

Gray finally joined his Juvia almost two and a half months into the end of the world, and Lucy stared abject despair in the eye for the first time. He had fought valiantly; had believed, to his very last, that it was his destiny to fight E.N.D., his destiny to purge the world of this most abominable of sins. He had been fooling himself; destiny had died the moment E.N.D. came into the world, blinking through Natsu's once-black eyes. Gray died with a half-finished curse on his lips, the partial cuss a testament to his belief that the world was fundamentally good. The world would not allow a creature like E.N.D. to go on unchecked, surely he would win, surely, surely–

When the light in his eyes flickered out, it took half of Lucy's hope and all of her will to live with them into the abyss.

* * *

He allowed them a two-week respite; for this last, final cataclysm between them, he was willing to give them the first move, it seemed. Lucy and Erza, the sole two people left in the resistance (in the country, in the world–), bandaged and healed what little of each other's wounds they could. Two weeks was enough to nurse them back to full strength, or an approximation of it; their strength had always come from their friends. Now they only had each other.

Not for the first time, Lucy wondered if his powers extended to telepathy for everyone and anyone, or if it was just her he had a special link to. He was there when they walked out of their makeshift shelter; standing in the middle of a blood-soaked field, the soil permanently dyed red by the blood of their friends. His eyes met Lucy's from across the distance.

 _"You came,"_ he hissed, and Lucy wanted to scrape her brains out through her ears if it meant she never had to hear his voice again.

"Natsu," Erza said, and he moved his attention to her, studying her as though he had never seen her before. He stayed still. Erza took it as encouragement.

"Natsu, please. I know you're in there."

Silence still. Erza's sword shifted in her grip. A drop of sweat rolled down her arm.

"Natsu, please, you have to come back, you have to return, for Lucy's sake, please-"

Erza died as she had lived; always putting others before her. Lucy saw her head separating from her neck as though underwater; everything seemed distorted and sluggish. A bright spray of red obscured her vision and rolled down her cheeks; from far away, Lucy could hear a desperate, keening sound that may or may not have been her own voice.

The ground squelched as he put his foot down, and Lucy kept on screaming.

He stopped in front of her, and reached for her chin. He yanked her face up, his talons digging into her skin, and still Lucy screamed.

"Finally. It's just you and me, babe," the voice in her mind hissed, and Lucy saw a forked tongue flicker out and trace his lips in anticipation. He smiled crookedly.

"Why, I'm all fired up now."


End file.
